Trouble building stairs from the jetty to the lower jetty.

[Twinmum]

I only got my copy of IP yesterday, so I've been playing today to find what I can and can't do with my building and I must be doing something wrong, because I just can't work out these stairs.
I bought a block of land and have built a modest house over the water. I wanted to build a little lower jetty on the end like a lot of the houses have, but I can't for the life of me connect the two with stairs. I've tried different stairs but no luck.
I've 'bought' (I was able to purchase it for nothing) the resort on the island with the art gallery. The name was something Hideaway, or something like that. Now I'm trying to add to it and I built a new jetty out over the water and again, I can't connect a lower jetty to it. The thing is, I can remove the stairs on the existing jetty there and replace them and I can add more stairs, but not on the new jetty. Anyone else come across this problem?

[mandamouse123]

I haven't tried to place stairs from one platform to another, but I was having trouble placing stairs from a single platform to the sand.  It used to be that when you tried to place stairs, the ground auto-leveled itself.  After I leveled the ground, placing stairs worked for me.  Even though it seems like it shouldn't matter, do you think the stairs are having an issue where they won't be placed because the ground between your two platforms isn't level?  I think it does, but can the ground that far out even be leveled?

[Ricalynn]

I had some problems with this recently and I went about doing it in a very "here's my elbow on our way to my knee" type way but I ended up using the CFE cheat to add the stairs and then level everything off in the two sections.  Although I suspect it's something like what Manda just mentioned.

[Twinmum]

I played around a bit more last night and I found a work around that is OK if you are adding to a lot that already has an existing upper and lower jetty. I just made temporary extensions from both the upper and lower existing jetty to where I wanted the new one to be and then deleted the joining pieces. I could then add stairs to the new part. As I said though, this is only good if you have an existing jetty to work from and is no good if you want to build from scratch.
I did notice that when I built my house and tried to put the stairs from the foundation to the ground that, like mandamouse said, it didn't autolevel and so I had to level the ground a bit and then place the stairs, but when I placed the stairs on the new resort jetty to the sand, it did it automatically. That little problem might be to do with how much of a slope there is.